In the fantasy world of defund police, a 7-year-old black girl doesn’t die from a bullet to the back of her head. Atlanta isn’t a fantasy world.

The random shooting death of a 7-year-old girl in Atlanta has prompted a coalition of politicians, police and businesses to ramp up calls to establish a private security force to supplement the Atlanta Police Department.

Seven year old Kennedy Maxie was fatally shot on Dec. 21 shortly after she had finished Christmas shopping with her family at the Phipps Plaza mall in Buckhead, an affluent residential and commercial neighborhood in Uptown Atlanta.

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It was somewhat surprising that a post about a 3-second Snapchat would go out into the wild, but it captured much of what’s at issue in the culture war. It wasn’t posted for shock value, or to demonstrate who was more culpable. To the extent blame was directed at anyone, it was the grownups.

First, the New York Times for publishing an article that framed the matter to valorize the young man who deliberately harmed a young woman, whose word choice was immature at best and offensive at worst, who intended harm to no one. Second, the University of Tennessee who succumbed to the shrieking of the mob by ousting her from matriculation. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

I don’t doubt Christopher Young’s sincerity when he wrote his op-ed in the New York Post. He says he is a progressive, and I don’t doubt it. He’s certainly not the only police officer who thinks that the War on Drugs is a failure, wants reform in other areas, etc. He then lists four police myths that he wants to debunk. The problem is that he’s wrong. My old mean-ass editor wrote about it and it’s good. It’s just not from the cop standpoint. Continue reading →

I appreciate Akiva Cohen. If he didn’t drudge through the nonsense suit filed by Rep. Louie Gohmert, et al., against Vice President Michael Pence, I might have felt compelled to, and I don’t want to. Having read some of the Trump election suit papers, and the shredding by Mike Dunford, I’ve suffered enough.

The crux of the suit*? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Patricia Stallings took her infant son Ryan to the hospital because of lethargy, vomiting and other symptoms. The hospital tested Ryan’s blood and found what it believed to be evidence of ethylene glycol and metabolic acidosis (his blood was too acidic). The key ingredient of antifreeze, ethylene glycol, produces low pH and can be fatal when it is ingested and metabolized into oxalate, which forms crystals with calcium ion in the brain and kidneys. Continue reading →

Seattle police detective, and former soldier, Christopher Young, begins by Gertruding to establish that he’s not just one of those bad cops and consequently easily dismissed.

As a progressive who wants to decriminalize drugs and advance the welfare state, I fit in well in my Pacific Northwest community. Except, that is, for my job: I’ve been a big-city cop here for 26 years. Before that, I served in the military. The raging #DefundthePolice movement doesn’t know me and my colleagues at all — and persistent myths about police and their critics do more harm than good.

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It was a 3-second Snapchat video made by a 15-year-old freshman who was excited to get her learner’s permit and sent privately to a friend. It would end up a catastrophe for Mimi Groves, but not by chance.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

Galligan was offended when he saw it. It wasn’t directed toward him, but it somehow wound its way around the school and ultimately onto his phone. Continue reading →

The Catch-22 of educating students who don’t show up when school is open and don’t sign on when it’s not is bad enough. Apologists offer the usual excuses, most of which have some element of truth in them but leave out the fact that if students and their parents wanted them to be educated, they would do everything in their power to make that happen. Yet, they don’t.

While the complaint/excuse cycle persists in New York City schools. the mayor has come up with a solution to address the “achievement gap.”

Some 700,000 of the city’s one million public school students are learning from home. The city is still working to convince teachers and parents that the schools are safe, a process that will continue well into next year — until vaccination is widespread. Many students, including homeless children, are still fighting just to gain reliable access to broadband internet service.

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Cops lie.

This is not a controversial assertion, because there is nobody, but nobody, who has a clue about criminal law who doesn’t know this to be true. But it’s also not sufficient to mean anything, because some lies are not only useful, but lawful, while others are not.

When cops take the witness stand to testify, they are as obliged to tell the “whole truth” as any other witness. They don’t, of course. At least not most of the time. It’s not that they lie about everything, although that happens, but they lie about little things, the normal gaps in their story that they either never knew, because they can be asked questions on cross that call for information that they took for granted, or they’ve forgotten the details they deem insignificant and so make them up on the stand. Continue reading →

Of all the odd voices to start such a fight, it was former Vox founder turned outcast Matt Yglesias.

I’m for a modest student debt forgiveness program (which I think is what Biden will do) but as you shift from “modest” to “total” debt forgiveness you are increasingly talking about helping dentists and lawyers rather than sympathetic cases.

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